Berman on Qutb on the Caliphate

Qutb, in launching his anarchistic odes to freedom, means to say that, under his proposed resurrected Islamic Caliphate, human beings will no longer be tyrannously ruled by other human beings, but only by God, as interpreted by God’s representatives.

As interpreted by God’s representatives, who of course are other human beings, but free of the restraints and accountability that secular politicians are subject to.

I have come to the view that the world’s first manual outlining the essential principles of a fascist social order was not Mein Kampf; not by a long stretch. It was the Koran.

Islamism is a special case of the more usually benign general state of fascism that is Islamic society. But the essential principle is the same: a gigantic pyramid of little hierarchies adding up to one huge hierarchy in which everyone has a place and accepts it, either willingly or unwillingly. But they accept it.

@2 – just because it isn’t democracy doesn’t make it fascism. All that hierarchy stuff made perfect sense in pre-1800 Europe just as well as it might do in the minds of Islamic scholars today. It would work very well within a discussion of Confucian politics, or caste. We, alas, are the unusual ones. And besides, real fascists were never that organised.

Well, that depends on what you understand by ‘fascism’. For my money, it is a mass-based armed religious movement: well organised in the case of Nazi Germany; somewhat slacker in that of say Franco’s Spain. The hierarchy they fight for puts an aristocracy (eg ‘Aryans’) into its upper ranks and lesser orders into a servility envisaged as permanent by the ideologues. Questioning of its doctrines is not tolerated, and no mechanism save violent overthrow or assassination exists for removal of unpopular people who get themselves into power positions.

Ian, I don’t generally enjoy discussions about fascism because it is a rather slippery term that even professional historians disagree upon. I’ve known some historians to insist that there has been only one fascist state ever: Mussolini’s Italy. (Even back in Orwell’s day when fascism was a living, breathing force, he commented that the term “fascist” had lost almost all meaning and was essentially synonymous with “bully.”) Regardless of which definition you seize upon, the key ingredients must include authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and nationalism.

Religion is not a central component of fascist ideology, it tends to be co-opted secondarily to totalitarianism. That is, fascists tend to see pluralism as a sign of cultural weakness, and in trying to stamp out pluralism they endorse one particular religion as the friend of the state. That’s how it worked in Italy under Mussolini and Spain under Franco. But even this is not always the case. Hitler’s approach to religious pluralism was to try to get the Catholic and Protestant churches in Germany to recognise their similarities and work together for the Fatherland.

Chris, if one waited for professional historians to agree on just about anything, nothing much would happen at all.

For my money, Nazism and communism were both religious movements in their own right, down to infallible pope, holy texts, and demonised heretics. They were both unwilling to co-opt the established religions except in the most exceptional circumstances, unlike the Mussolini and Franco regimes.

but free of the restraints and accountability that secular politicians are subject to.

Or not. Seeing that Qutb’s experience of modern politics in his own country, Egypt, were of a corrupt and brutal regime, he may have had excuses for thinking that secular politics were the road to misery. Still, it was terribly naive of him to think that it was a choice between either a secular tyrant or religious absolutism. (Of course, Marx and Lenin jumped into the same kind of pitfall when, for an alternative to the absolute power of the bourgeois state, they wanted to substitute a dictatorship of the proletariat… People who mistake politics for a zero-sum game often think like that.)